Blockworks Research says PUMP may be one of the most mispriced assets in crypto, based on PumpFun’s revenue base, token mechanics, and its push from infrastructure into consumer products. The report says PumpFun has already built one of the most profitable and durable infrastructure businesses in the industry, with annualized revenue at $677 million and the lowest weekly revenue volatility among the top 10 revenue-producing protocols.
The report was written by shaunda devens and later translated by Odaily. Its central claim is that PumpFun now operates across two layers: a core infrastructure stack made up of its launchpad and decentralized exchange, and a fast-growing consumer business aimed at social trading. Since early July, front-end trading volume has risen 5.6x, according to the report.
In that framework, PUMP is described as one of the few liquid tokens that offers direct exposure to meme coin activity and the consumer layer built around it. The report also argues that PUMP has strong reflexivity because revenue growth and token price appreciation reinforce each other. Over the past 48 weeks, starting from September 2025, PUMP’s weekly price change had a 0.35 correlation with weekly revenue change, ranking third among 46 revenue-generating tokens covered in the sample. HYPE was listed at 0.32.
Even so, the report says PUMP trades at just 2.8x price-to-sales, a discount to comparable assets. The analysts trace that discount to two issues: near-term concern around token-holder alignment, and a broader misunderstanding of where PumpFun actually makes money.
PumpFun’s two-layer business
The report frames PumpFun as both market infrastructure and an emerging consumer platform. On the infrastructure side, it says the company holds a leadership position through its launchpad and DEX. On the consumer side, it is using Terminal and its mobile app to gain control over the user-facing entry point. That makes PUMP, in the analysts’ view, a broad and liquid “picks-and-shovels” asset tied directly to speculative activity.
According to the report, PumpFun currently processes 70% of Solana meme coin volume and roughly half of all-chain meme coin DEX volume. Meme coin markets are cyclical and shift quickly, but the report says PumpFun has not only defended its lead in launches. It has also captured more DEX volume and expanded into new verticals such as the consumer layer.
Since 2024, cumulative revenue has reached $1.37 billion, the report says. Excluding stablecoin issuers, PumpFun’s revenue this year trails only Hyperliquid, making it one of the highest-earning applications in crypto. Revenue stability is another part of the thesis. Weekly revenue volatility stands at 29.7%, the lowest among the top 10 revenue-producing protocols tracked in the study.
How the launchpad and PumpSwap work together
The infrastructure layer has two parts: the launchpad and PumpSwap.
The launchpad reduces the friction of creating a token and removes the need for a project to seed AMM liquidity upfront. New tokens first trade on a bonding-curve AMM with virtual reserves. As users buy, real reserves build up and are later used to fund the liquidity pool once the token “graduates.”
That pool is then created on PumpSwap, PumpFun’s in-house DEX. The report argues that this lets PumpFun keep earning fees after a token moves into secondary-market trading, instead of ceding that revenue to outside exchanges.
By combining token creation and liquidity formation in one product, PumpFun has a differentiated service and can charge meaningful fees. The report puts the bonding-curve fee at 125 bps, of which Pump retains 95 bps.
As the launchpad became the default venue for meme coin issuance, PumpFun’s infrastructure also became embedded in consumer apps such as Axiom and Fomo. Those apps route users into PumpFun’s market, which means PumpFun can benefit from activity across multiple front ends without making its own growth depend on whether any single app can hold users over time.
That has created a more durable infrastructure advantage in a business where traffic leadership changes fast, the report says. Even as the leaders on the front end have rotated several times, PumpFun still accounts for about 98% of Solana launchpad bonding-curve volume. Each new integration strengthens that distribution edge because creators launching on PumpFun get immediate access to users already gathered by those integrated apps.
Covering the full meme coin life cycle also broadens monetization. In the second quarter of 2026, the launchpad and DEX together generated $85.2 million in revenue, according to the report. Based on third-quarter performance so far, the annualized run rate has reached $125.4 million, up 47% quarter over quarter. The launchpad contributed an annualized run rate of $87.1 million, up 41%, while PumpSwap contributed $38.3 million, up 64%. PumpSwap’s realized take rate also climbed from 5 bps to 13.3 bps.
The consumer layer: Terminal and mobile
The second pillar of the PumpFun story is its move into consumer products.
For an infrastructure company, the report says, that shift matters in two ways. It gives PumpFun a path into the consumer layer of the meme coin value chain, where fee revenue had previously leaked away. It also gives the company direct contact with end users, reducing reliance on third-party platforms and opening room for more product expansion.
PumpFun has already made several acquisitions, the report says, including the July 2025 acquisition of Kolscan’s wallet analytics business and the acquisition of Vyper’s execution infrastructure. The current consumer push centers on two products aimed at different phases of the token life cycle and different rivals.
Terminal focuses on newly launched tokens. According to the report, PumpFun acquired Padre in October 2025, and that deal set the direction for Terminal as a professional trading venue for early-stage tokens still on the bonding curve. The direct rival there is Axiom.
The mobile app targets tokens that have already graduated and moved into secondary-market trading. Its focus is retail-facing social trading, putting it into competition with Fomo through product development and incentives. Kolscan contributes wallet tracking, trader P&L, and leaderboard features that help users identify opportunities. Callouts lets users broadcast token ideas to followers and earn from Callout Rewards, a daily USDC reward pool distributed in proportion to the trading volume generated by each callout.
That consumer layer has been an important part of the meme coin fee stack for some time. Since March 2024, the report says, it has accounted for between 31% and 44% of meme coin fee share each month, and PumpFun has not fully captured that segment yet.
Progress has been slower here than in infrastructure because PumpFun has to compete head-on with front ends that already hold user attention. The report says PumpFun still trails Fomo on mobile and trails Axiom in trading terminals.
Still, the analysts see upside. One reason is treasury capacity. Callout Rewards alone can distribute about $1 million per day, the report says. Another is price competition. Because PumpFun already monetizes the underlying volume through the launchpad and PumpSwap, it can undercut rivals on user-facing fees. PumpFun mobile currently charges no interface fee, compared with Fomo’s 0.5%.
The data in the report suggests that strategy has started to work. Daily front-end volume across mobile and Terminal has increased 5.6x since early July. In the first week of the observation window, average daily volume was just $15 million. By the first week of September, it had climbed to $84 million, and it hit a $100 million peak on Sept. 4. Over the same period, daily active users on mobile rose from 5,600 to 34,100.
Those products are intentionally free for now, but the report models their earning power using a Fomo-like 50 bps fee. Based on last week’s volume, mobile alone could contribute about $128 million in annual revenue, equal to a 24% increase over PumpFun’s current revenue base.
Owning the front end could also support expansion into adjacent businesses. The report points to Kalshi and Polymarket as examples of platforms using their core market position to move into nearby verticals. It says PumpFun could eventually do the same in perps and prediction markets. As one early sign, the report notes that PumpFun led a $1 million financing round in Pumpcade, which is building around live streaming and prediction markets.
Why the report says the market is reading the business wrong
The report presents PumpFun as a business deeply embedded in meme coin trading, with a relatively resilient fee base and extra upside from fast-growing consumer products. It also places PUMP inside a broader cycle thesis. In a crypto market that is moving toward what the authors call “abstracted finance,” the preferred assets are infrastructure and consumer businesses. PUMP is unusual because it sits across both, while also offering one of the few liquid, pure-play exposures to the meme coin sector.
The reflexivity argument sits at the center of that thesis. Because PumpFun’s activity level is tightly linked to speculation, a higher token price can bring more attention, more trading, and more revenue. That means price appreciation does not have to come only from multiple expansion. Instead, the report describes a loop in which price gains lift activity, activity lifts revenue, and revenue supports further price gains.
The analysts say the market is making a different mistake by using meme coin market capitalization as a shortcut for PumpFun’s business health. The report argues that the link is weak. It says 96% of PumpFun revenue comes from tokens with market caps below $1 million. In that view, a falling aggregate meme coin market cap does not imply a weakening business. If anything, it may show that attention and capital have been spread across thousands of small tokens, which itself reflects the strength of PumpFun’s launch system.
The report compares current activity with the January 2025 peak and finds a split picture. In August, token issuance was at 69% of the peak level. Bonding-curve trade count was at 76%. Bonding-curve volume in SOL terms reached 91%. The number of graduations hit a record high. Yet the total market capitalization of tokens launched by PumpFun was only 19% of the peak level, and secondary-market meme coin trading volume was just 11%. Even so, revenue measured in SOL reached 661,000 SOL, above January 2025’s 647,000 SOL.
From that angle, the report says, PumpFun revenue has already reached a record high. It then adds another point: PumpFun has since launched its own DEX and Terminal. If overall industry activity returns to January 2025 levels, the report estimates monthly revenue at about $280 million, nearly double the monthly revenue near the previous peak.
The token-holder alignment debate
Even with a positive stance on PUMP, the report treats token-holder alignment as the main source of valuation uncertainty. The issue is not whether PumpFun is a strong business. The issue is how much of that business value can realistically accrue to the token.
The report says that even as PumpFun raised more than $1 billion, it remained unclear how its revenue would flow to token holders. The widely cited claim of a 25% revenue share came mainly from media reports rather than official communication.
The official line, according to the report, has been clear: PUMP does not represent equity or debt in the company, and it confers no right to revenue, profit, dividends, distributions, or any other cash flow. Buyers also should not purchase PUMP expecting economic returns from buybacks or the efforts of the Pump team.
One thing is clear, the report says: the $2 billion treasury belongs to Baton Corp, not to PUMP holders. What remains unclear is how important the token is to PumpFun’s broader business strategy.
The report lays out two interpretations. One is that PumpFun discovered it could raise more than $1 billion by issuing a token without giving holders legal rights in the business, and that the model itself is highly attractive. The other is that the team is actually aligned with token holders but cannot state that openly for legal reasons. The analysts lean toward the first interpretation. They say the team’s prior actions did not show token holders were a primary constituency, and argue that in a friendlier regulatory environment there would be little reason not to state a clear token-equity relationship if such a relationship truly existed.
Still, they say the short-term setup changed on April 28, 2026. Starting then, PumpFun began using 50% of protocol revenue for programmatic PUMP buybacks and burns through a locked contract for one year. At the launch of that mechanism, it also burned $370 million worth of PUMP, equal to 36% of circulating supply at that time.
Based on the last 30 days of revenue, the report estimates about $27.8 million per month is being directed to buybacks, equivalent to a 17.6% annualized yield on the circulating market cap. As of Sept. 8, the realized buyback pace over the past 30 days annualized to 16.4%, the highest in the report’s comparable token set. On a market-cap basis, the buying pressure was said to be stronger than Strategy’s peak historical BTC accumulation intensity and higher than BitMine’s peak ETH accumulation rate, trailing only the combined buying from Hyperliquid’s Assistance Fund and Hyperliquid Strategies.
Unlocks and on-chain transfer behavior
A closely related concern is the synchronized unlock schedule, especially whether team members and insiders, who also hold equity in the business, will sell after receiving tokens.
The report says PUMP’s unlock structure gave the team 20% of supply and existing investors 13%, both subject to a 12-month cliff. That cliff expired on July 12, 2026, releasing 82.5 billion PUMP in total, with 50 billion to the team and 32.5 billion to investors. After that came a three-year linear unlock. Every month, 6.875 billion tokens unlock in one of 36 tranches, including about 4.2 billion for the team and 2.7 billion for investors, continuing through July 2029.
Tracking where those tokens go matters for two reasons, the report says. It helps estimate the net supply effect after buybacks, and in the absence of official disclosure it gives one of the best available signals about insider expectations.
The analysts write that insiders know more than anyone else about the token’s possible future utility and valuation. Their transfer behavior can therefore indicate what they think the token is ultimately worth. The conclusion from the on-chain work was that there has been little confirmed large-scale selling so far.
As of Aug. 31, 62.1 billion PUMP had entered recipient wallets linked to those unlocks. About 5% was sold on-chain, 13% was moved to exchange deposit addresses, and another 5% was transferred to other wallets. Roughly three-quarters of the tokens never left the original receiving wallets.
If all of the 23% already moved is treated as sold, the report estimates that circulating supply would still shrink by about 8% by April 2027. Even if insiders sell every future unlocked token, circulating supply would increase by only about 2%.
The report stops short of saying this proves long-term value accrual to token holders. It does say the data suggests some mechanism of value retention exists and that insiders do not appear to view PUMP as a simple exit vehicle. It also cites a comment from the founder of VVV: 「Equity holders are the token’s largest holders, and making the token benefit is one of the most leveraged ways for equity to serve its own interests.」
That idea matters in the PumpFun case because the company reportedly has $2 billion in assets, keeps 50% of revenue, and operates in a sector that depends heavily on attention. In the analysts’ view, PUMP is itself an important strategic advantage relative to rivals without tokens, and a rising token price can be a powerful way to attract market attention. For that reason, the report says the team has limited incentive to damage that strategic value through heavy short-term selling while the token still trades at a discount.
Revenue, buybacks, and valuation under three scenarios
The valuation section models PumpFun’s revenue and buybacks under different market activity conditions. The framework uses three historical anchors, paired with current market share and realized take rates.
The three scenarios are:
- Bear case: activity falls back to the June 2026 low, the weakest month for Solana meme coin volume since April 2024.
- Base case: activity returns to the monthly average seen since April 2024. The report says August token issuance and bonding-curve trading already exceeded that level, while secondary-market volume remained below it.
- Bull case: activity returns to the average level seen during the peak quarter from November 2024 through January 2025. January 2025 alone is then used as an additional upside reference point.
Using current monetization rates, the report assumes PumpFun earns 91 bps on launchpad bonding-curve volume, 14 bps on PumpSwap volume, and about 58 bps on Terminal-routed volume, derived from a 100 bps interface fee net of trader rebates.
That leads to annualized revenue estimates of:
- Bear case: $310 million
- Base case: $836 million
- Bull case: $2.5 billion
If the market simply returns to the January 2025 peak, one peak month alone would imply an annualized run rate of about $3.4 billion. Since half of revenue is directed to buy back PUMP, the annual buyback and burn figures under the three modeled cases come to:
- Bear case: $155 million
- Base case: $418 million
- Bull case: $1.24 billion
Against PUMP’s current $1.93 billion market capitalization, the report says that, with 231 days remaining until April 28, 2027 on the buyback contract, the program would remove tokens equal to 5.1%, 13.7%, and 40.7% of current market value under the three scenarios.
The analysts do not use a single valuation multiple across all cases. Their argument is that PumpFun’s market activity is itself shaped by reflexivity, so stronger revenue environments should also support higher valuation multiples. On that basis, they assign:
- Bear case: 1.5x to 2.8x P/S, ranging from PUMP’s own historical low multiple to the current 2.8x
- Base case: 3x to 5x P/S
- Bull case: 5x to 10x P/S
After weighting the three outcomes 25% bear, 50% base, and 25% bull, the report arrives at a valuation range of $0.0108 to $0.0205 for PUMP. That equals 2.3x to 4.4x the Sept. 9 price of $0.0047.
Under a stronger upside case in which market activity returns to the prior peak, the report says PUMP could trade at $0.0299 to $0.0598, or 6.4x to 12.9x current price. In the bearish case, if market sentiment also deteriorates, it models a return to around the June low at $0.0011 to $0.0019, implying a drawdown of 59% to 76% from the current price.
Risks: wash-trading questions and competition
The report also lays out the downside risks. One long-running concern is the unusual stability of PumpFun revenue during weaker markets, which has fueled speculation about wash trading and whether the platform may have encouraged issuance by paying bots or other participants.
The authors say outsiders cannot see the company’s internal accounting, and that uncertainty is a risk on its own. They add that Blockworks data already filters out wash trading. As for the possibility that traders are being compensated for launching and trading tokens, the report says current activity still appears organic. In August, addresses that initiated more than 100 launches collectively earned $32.3 million, with 72% profitable. The top 100 traders by volume collectively earned $14 million after fees.
The more immediate issue, in the report’s view, is growing competition at the launchpad layer. Since July, launchpad fees have increased 4.4x, rising from $20.8 million in the first week of July to $92.4 million in the week ended Sept. 8. Over the same stretch, Pons and STONK grew rapidly, reaching market capitalizations of $677 million and $211 million, respectively. PumpFun, however, appeared to lose share. Across the fees produced by those three platforms, its share fell to 32%, down from 90% in the week ended Aug. 25.
The report notes that PumpFun has recovered share after previous declines, but says the current response has looked slower.
On Pons, the analysts say PumpFun’s mistake was not expanding to EVM early enough. The thinking may have been that execution would eventually be abstracted away, leaving users insensitive to the underlying environment, while Solana still offered the best performance. The report calls that a mistake because it underestimates the value of ecosystem narrative, especially on chains such as Base and Robinhood Chain, where distribution strength and potential listing pathways for ecosystem tokens can matter. PumpFun’s own mobile app now routes more than half of its trading volume to Robinhood Chain, the report says, while the launchpad remains on Solana. In that same period, PONS rose from a $83 million market capitalization to $677 million.
On STONK’s model of mixing equities and meme coins on Solana, the report reaches a similar conclusion. StonkFun launched on Aug. 3 and moved issuance to Raydium LaunchLab on Sept. 6. PumpFun’s response, Custom Pairs, was not released until Sept. 9. That meant a five-week delay from launch and a three-day delay after StonkFun’s fee revenue had already crossed $1 million per day. The report says the market did not like the response either, noting that PUMP fell about 10% after the announcement.
The broader point is that PumpFun used to benefit from established market position, allowing it to copy competing features and then win through execution. The recent sequence has raised more doubt about whether that advantage can still hold. The next several weeks and months, the report says, will be important as the market watches how PumpFun responds to the challenge from Pons and StonkFun.
The report closes by repeating that token-holder alignment remains a real risk and a meaningful constraint on owning PUMP, especially for holding periods that extend past April 2027. Even before then, the market may start discounting the possibility that the current programmatic buyback plan will not be renewed. In the short term, however, the analysts say that risk could be partly offset by the possibility that the buyback program is extended.
Bottom line from the report
The conclusion is not that PUMP is simple. The report says PumpFun’s lack of transparency, combined with uncertainty about how business value reaches the token, makes PUMP one of the hardest tokens in crypto to value on fundamentals. But it argues the market is making two mistakes at once: overpricing alignment risk in the near term even though buybacks run through April 2027, and benchmarking PUMP against the broader meme coin index rather than against PumpFun’s own revenue, which has reached an all-time high in SOL terms.
On that basis, the analysts remain constructive on PUMP at the current 2.8x P/S multiple. The key test from here, they say, is whether PumpFun can respond effectively to Pons and StonkFun and defend its position at the launchpad layer.